Colour & Music Links

Hearing/ Seeing Light and Colour.

Throughout my career I have always been interested by both the experience of colour (in my case often associated with chords and patterns of notes) but also the physical appearance of colour, the effect of colour via light and the meaning of colour and I am currently still reading fascinating books on the history of Colours. Although a lot has been written about colour, there are not that many good books on colour generally. I am also fascinated by Medieval Colour Lore of Colours, of which hardly anything has been written. The two stand out books broaching the subject of Colour are John Gage’s Colour and Meaning, and Colour and Culture. For me the different experiences of colour came together in a performance a few years ago in Liverpool, where I painted underneath a huge lantern of magnificent colours shining through stained glass, to colour based music and colours I was producing live via performance.

For my most recent performances I have painted (to use other’s descriptions) musically fired forests of colour on Perspex, which have been almost exotic in colour. The colours can be experienced in different ways in the performance and on Perspex I can achieve the effects of transitory colours in space, similar to what I experience when listening to music.

Summertime with Amit Chaudhuri.

Now I am looking at ways in which I can achieve this effect via exhibiting my work, looking at the work of Seeper and United Visual Artists who create huge and sometimes interactive displays involving all the senses.

I have also recently as mentioned before been looking into the use of lasers and have visited Professor Simon Hooker’s lab in Oxford where amazing colours are produced via high powered lasers known as Frequency combs. This last month I went to see an extraordinary exhibition involving light by Anthony McCall where entering a darkened space to be confronted by cones of what almost looked like steel sculptures but were actually made from projected light. The light slowly moved creating slowly moving shapes on the floor, which were mesmerizing and had a rare and beautiful simplicity. This is something I would love to achieve in my own work.